Stern cocked his head, eyed him with a lawyer’s caginess. “And what’s your percentage?”
Sam’s heart thrilled. As a child, he’d seen The Thief of Baghdad and for years after had fantasized about having its huge, forbidding genie at his command, to do his bidding. What is thy wish, O my master?
Sam plunged a hand into his pocket, withdrew the dog-eared notepad, one of so many, with their hundreds and thousands of notations, all the days and weeks and years of outrage and insult.
“There’s some people I’d like you to meet. .,” he said.
Cal found himself swimming against a tide of humanity, every cross street hopelessly clogged with folks making their way toward Central Park, drawn by the glare of the huge propane lamps of the National Guard encampment there.
Cal darted into an alleyway behind some restaurants. It reeked of rotted vegetables, spoiled meat, but mercifully there was no one in sight. He dodged spilled trash cans, leaped over rubbish, picking up speed.
“Yo, Ginsu!” The voice echoed off cold brick. “Where’s your girlfriend?” The alley was pitch dark, but there was no mistaking the haircut in the reflected candleglow from a window above, the shirt with its grinning death’s head.
Cal slowed as Misfits swaggered toward him. “Get a load of this,” he said. He extended a hand.
The trash at Cal’s feet quivered, whipped about as in a sharp wind, and Cal felt himself gripped hard, pulled by a powerful suction. He struggled, but there was no fighting it. It swept him up, hurled him toward the open hand, which caught him by the throat, squeezed tight.
Misfits bared ragged, nicotine-stained teeth in a delighted grin. “Magnet Man, just like with the gun. Didn’t know I could do it till tonight. Been wastin’ my time in vocational school.” He winced. “Man, my ribs hurt.”
He raised the police automatic, held it an inch from Cal’s face. “Am I glad to see you,” he said.
Chapter Fourteen
“Wait!” Cal shot out a desperate hand. Misfits fired. But there was no bang. Instead, the gun gave off a weak spark, like a lighter not quite catching.
While Misfits was still doing a double-take, Cal reacted, stomped the younger man’s instep. The youth doubled over. Cal twisted in his grip and elbowed him in the mouth.
His advantage was momentary. Misfits lunged back at him with a kick that knocked Cal sprawling and drove the breath from him. Conditioned by years of TV and movie fights, though, the young man couldn’t give up the idea of a gun. Instead of advancing, Misfits fired again.
And again, the fizzy little flash, the ping of a bullet falling out of the muzzle.
Cal rolled to his feet and fled, stumbling on his first stride but then leveling into speed he hadn’t thought himself capable of. Misfits fired after him: pht-clink, pht-clink, pht-clink. Feeble flashes in the dark.
Leaning against an alley wall later, belly hurting more than he’d thought possible from the youth’s kick, Cal thought about the encounter.
Magnet Man, didn’t know I could do it. .
Had he really seen what he’d seen?
Defective gun? But he’d seen the spark. And it hadn’t jammed, he’d heard the bullets fall.
One defective bullet, maybe, but all of them?
The gun moving along the pavement. .
Being dragged into the young man’s grip. .
Planes falling out of the sky.
He took a deep breath, straightened up. His palms were bleeding from hitting the pavement, and his elbow was bruised from Misfits’ teeth.
The image of Tina came flooding back to him, and the horror and chaos of Roosevelt. Cal hurried up the alley, jogging at first until the pain in his belly eased, then running full out again, like a man pursued by the darkness he’d all his life tried to outrun.
WEST VIRGINIA
They still don’t know, thought Wilma, her long stride keeping easy pace with Shannon Grant’s hurrying feet, with the small scuttling Marcia duPone. They still don’t understand.
She didn’t understand either, not exactly. She would have been hard put even to explain the suspicions and speculations that circled through her mind. But she knew to her marrow that what had happened wasn’t a power outage.
Something had changed. Whatever had driven her out of Arleta’s house-and it was a consciousness, a blinded screaming hammering rage-filled Something-wasn’t part of a world where power outages or earthquakes or cave-ins, or even nuclear war for that matter, were what you had to worry about.
She carried a two-and-a-half-gallon bottle of Allegheny Spring Water and a canvas bag filled with candles, lamp oil and three disassembled colored-glass oil lamps. Anyone who lived for any length of time within driving distance of a dozen Appalachian craft fairs picked up colored-glass oil lamps: impractical for the most part, but an inevitable gift at Christmas-time. Shannon had two in her satchel, plus another, burning, in her hand. Marcia brought only one, having decided that food was more important.
“It’s only been since nine this morning,” pointed out Shannon, eyeing the old woman’s collapsible shopping cart of canned tuna and bags of day-old bread.
“I grew up in the Depression, honey,” announced Marcia, in case Shannon had somehow neglected to assimilate a statement she’d heard four times a day since birth. “And I know there’s nothing worse than being hungry. If I feel that way, and my Gus feels that way, and God knows my Tommy feels that way, you know half those men down there feel that way.”
Shut up, thought Wilma, not in impatience, but because her new awareness brought her sounds from the darkness around them. Her mind snapped away from uneasy concern about Arleta and Bob as she thought she saw something run, dodging nimbly between the stranded cars, across the bottom of Applby Lane in front of them. There was a ruffle and scurry in Gerda Weise’s lantana bushes to their left, and a smell.
Coal and ground water. Tobacco and grime.
Alien flesh.
“Mother used to take all of us down to the bakery, where they’d give us day-old bread for a nickle, and we’d all bring our pillow cases. . ”
It was impossible to hear, but Wilma thought they were being paralleled on the other side of the street as well. Her night-sighted eyes could see nothing, but sounds came to her from the other side of the dark houses, the crunch and skitter of stooped bodies slipping through backyards, the creak as something heavy went over Carl Souza’s fence. The muffled grunt-grunt-grunt of snuffling breath.
“Marcia,” she said softly, touching her friend’s sloped shoulder, “could you be quiet a minute? I think I hear something following us.”
Marcia stopped in her tracks. “What? Following us? What the hell would be following us? For God’s sake, everybody in this town is in the same boat.”
“What is it?” asked Shannon, stopping and holding up her lamp.
“Middle of the street,” said Wilma, hearing it coming, fast, through the dark screen of the Souzas’ overgrown yard. Her two companions looked around blankly while she saw-and clearly they did not-the clotted mass of hedge and laurel jerk and twitch, heard the slash-slash-slash of running feet and smelled trampled herbage and wet-coal stink, sweat stink, alien stink racing toward them through the undergrowth. “Middle of the street!” she yelled again, grabbing each of the other women by the arm and thrusting them toward open ground.
“Wilma, what the. .?” Marcia planted her feet, then let out a shriek as the slumped grubby thing burst out of the dark of the hedges and grabbed for her throat.
If Wilma hadn’t already been shoving her, the older woman would have been killed, for the thing’s hands, clutching at her shoulder as Wilma yanked her clear, were hugely strong. As it was, Marcia screamed again in shock and terror and pain, and something else raced out of the shadows between the Ure and Dixon houses across the street, grunting as it reached for them with apelike arms. Wilma saw round, huge blinking white eyes reflecting the flare of Shannon’s lamp and went for them instinctively, her hands bent to claw.